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Making a translation PDF Print E-mail
Written by Ixen   
Saturday, 21 October 2006

This article provides some insight into translating Copy Handler to your own language.

Before we begin

The first and most important thing is to make a decision to translate a program or/and help system to your native language. The second is a decision about sharing it, when you have already done the translation.

Those are the decisions you have to make by yourself. Note hovewer, that by doing this - you are helping other people in you country who does not know English or other languages from the list of supported ones.

How to start

The first step is probably already done by you and that was to download Copy Handler 1.30 or later. There is a tool included for helping translating the program.

Translating a program

All the translation attempts involve the ictranslate program - you can locate it in the directory where you have installed Copy Handler (in the version post 1.30 it should also be available in the start menu).

After you run the program you should:

  1. Load base translation (should be english.lng from the langs directory of Copy Handler),
  2. (Optional) Load your translation or one of the translation already available with CH if you want to correct it,
  3. In the list on the left there should be texts to be translated and on the right a list of texts to translate/update/...
  4. You should fill or update the informations about your translation (author, language name and so on),
  5. For each string on the left side should be an accompanying translated string on the right. To make the translation - select one of the strings to be translated, translate the selected text using the edit box on the right and apply translation (either by using the button or using menu entries or using shortcut keys),
  6. After verifying the translation all the items in the right list should be marked as green. If there is another color then there is a problem with the translation:
  • yellow means that the text in your translation is outdated (the original text has changed since your text was last translated),
  • blue means that your translation contains the text that is not being used anymore and could be removed (you can do this with Clean translation),
  • red means that your translation does not have translated text for the text on the left,
  • purple means that the translated text does not match the source text - it could mean that:
  • source text contains a space at the beginning or at the end, and your translated text does not (it probably should contain it at the same location),
  • the formatting strings (%s, %lu, %errdesc, ...) does not appear in the translated text or appears in invalid order. Formatting string must be included in the translated string in order defined by the base translation

When you have everything ready - please safe the translation to a file and and submit the file on the site in the download section -> translations. After reviewing it by administrator - it would be published on site for download.

Alternatively you could just send the translation to me.

Translation of a help file

The help source contains a lot of files:

  • the .txt files - they contains the tool tips for the buttons, lists, ... on the dialog boxes.
    The are in the form of: 
    	.topic 0x00
    	No topic has been associated with this item.

     	.topic 1
    	Closes this window.

     	.topic IDH_HOMEPAGELINK_STATIC
    	Link to this program's home page.

     	.topic IDH_HOSTLINK_STATIC
    	Link to the web page of our web page sponsor.
    The lines that begins with '.topic ' specifies the combined identifier of the dialog box/control id for which there is the tool tip text. Just below there is a text that will be shown for the control in the dialog box.
  • file headfoot.js - javascript used to display the header and footer of each page. You can change the footer to enter you as the author or to change anything else.
  • .htm - these files are the html pages that describes some topics. You shouldn't have any problem with translating it if you are a bit familiar with the html.
  • files help.hhc, help.hhk and help.hhp are the MS Html Help Workshop files used to build the compiled .chm help files. You can either use the MS tool (easier way) or edit the files manually (do this if you know what you are doing). They contains the keywords, the topic names and some other info.

After doing it - please test it with program and your language file to make sure it works well. Then, as with language file, please upload it in the download section -> translations. After reviewing this by admin - it will be made available for downloading.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 March 2008 )
 
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